


Ephemerals

by faceofstone



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Dreams, Gen, Missing Scene, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-08 13:15:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8846491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/pseuds/faceofstone
Summary: Put a dream in a machine and it will find a crack and slip away.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GriegPlants](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GriegPlants/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

“Agent Cooper, I'm sorry. Agent Cooper. Agent Cooper!”

Dale Cooper is resting under a fallen tree. An arrow, which is a knife, a bullet, the superimposition of all the tools mankind ever devised to hurt their kin, sticks out of his chest, and he knows he is prey, and he knows the hunter is far away and waits for him to pursue. There is a path carved in the underbrush, under the branching sycamores. He can tell by the yellow bricks that line it.

 

“Are you feeling alright, Agent Cooper?”

He leans against the fallen tree, which is as soft as a motel's couch. An opening among the leaves reveals a ceiling lit by a naked incandescent bulb.

“Please wake up.”

Dale Cooper opens an eye through six hundred and twenty-eight rings of oak bark. “I am fine, Sam,” he whispers.

“The words you said in your sleep weren't fine. Unless they were a metaphor. But I don't think you can make a happy meaning out of sad words - or can you?”

A good question for another day. _Do you think we could, Diane? If I could wake up, leave my badge behind and be a poet, this is a challenge I would take up. Maybe someone who never wore a badge already answered it, and the narrowing corridor of my life never crossed that answer. Never mind, Diane._

“You said 'sorry’, before.”

“I do say it, when I mean it. And I mean what i say, Agent Cooper. I am sorry I do not have a machine for dreams. I tried to make one, last September. A dream has got to be worth something, it has clues and variables, like a case. But you can't tell it to a machine. Or I couldn't. I've got my machine for cases, but I have no machine for dreams. I am sorry I could not help you find a way out of yours.”

“That's life, Sam.”

“Isn't it just the way it is, Agent Cooper.”

 

In this moment of resignation, of surrender to a world that will never fit inside a scheme, his words carry a soft, desperate empathy, one that ferries Dale back to the waking world. An echo of the forest took roots within him; as he faces the setting sun to take in the sight of the desert outside (sturdy, fixed, concrete, at least in the face of the day), Dale Cooper remains in the shadow.

He snaps his fingers, startling his companion: he'll go get coffee for them both. That should help.

 


End file.
